Ostrogoths under Totila capture Rome after a year’s siege
Richard Cavendish remembers the events of December 17th, 546.
The capture of the ‘Eternal City’ by the king of the Ostrogoths, Totila, was one episode in a complex thirty-year struggle for control of the Italian peninsula between the barbarians who had overthrown the Roman empire in the West and the forces of its surviving section in the East, Byzantium, under its emperor Justinian. But Rome’s fall a few days before Christmas 546 – as a result of some of its hunger-stricken defenders opening the gates to the besieging Goths – was a symbol of the hard times that the ‘Dark Ages’ had brought to what had once been the centre of the civilised world.
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